His question caught them off-guard. Their boss enjoyed a hard-won reputation as a thoroughly unpleasant little prick with an amazingly rigid pole up his ass. A couple of them exchanged quick glances, but nobody said anything for a few moments until Barnes, their magnetic ram technician, ventured a reply.

“Well, it’s not our fault we fell behind. But you can bet we’ll get blamed if we don’t hustle to catch up.”

“Exactly!” Pope replied. “Let’s prepare for a test run at point-zero-one efficiency. That should be enough to confirm a stabilized effect with the new figures. Are we all agreed?”

They were.

HMAS MORETON BAY, 1049 HOURS, 15 JANUARY 2021

Lieutenant Rachel Nguyen had slept six hours out of the last forty-eight. As the defensive systems operator of the troop cat Moreton Bay, she felt herself directly responsible for the lives of four hundred soldiers and thirty-two crewmembers. The Moreton Bay was a fat, soft, high-value target; so much more tempting for would-be martyrs or renegade Indonesian forces than the Clinton, or the Kandahar, or any of the escort vessels. The software for the catamaran’s Metal Storm CIWS—Close-In Weapons System—had been twitching and freezing up ever since they’d loaded the update patches during the last refit in Sydney. Nguyen, at the tail end of a marathon hacking session, had just come to the conclusion she’d be better off trashing the updates and reverting to the old program.

She rubbed her eyes and swiveled her chair around to face Captain Sheehan. The ancient mariner seemed to read her mind.

“You want to dump the new system, Lieutenant?” he asked, even before she had a chance to speak.

Damn, she thought. How does he do that?

“I don’t really want to, sir, but it’s buggy as hell. The pods are just as likely to target us as any incoming.”

Sheehan rubbed at his chin beneath the thick beard he had sported for as long as Nguyen had known him. “Okay,” he agreed after a moment’s thought. “Tell the Clinton we’re going to take them offline for—how long to reload the old software?”

Nguyen shrugged. “A few minutes to deep-six the garbage code, five and a half to reload the classic. Say ten to be sure.”

“Okay. Tell the Clinton we’re taking the pods offline for fifteen minutes to change over the programming, so we’ll need them to assign us extra cover through CBL. The Trident’s closest, she’ll do nicely.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Rachel, genuinely grateful to be released from the burden of hacking the software on her own.

Sheehan watched her closely for a moment longer, then turned to peer out through the tinted blast windows of the cat’s bridge. The sea surface was nearly mirror still.